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Sofie's Docs Diary Vol. 7: Codegarden 2018 docs wrap-up

Time flies. It’s already almost a month ago we all attended Codegarden 18 - what a week! Codegarden 18 was really a fantastic year for the Umbraco Documentation. We got a ton of feedback during the week and even more so when we had the Open Space session about how we should work with the Umbraco Documentation going forward. There is so much I want to share with you, so let’s get this show on the road:

Docs happenings at CG18

If you attended Codegarden this year you might have noticed that the Umbraco Documentation got a lot of attention. One of the reasons for this is that we here at Umbraco HQ have started to focus more on the community aspect of Umbraco.

The Documentation Curators - united IRL for the first time. On Damiaan's shoulder you find mini-Marcemarc; the Marc-substitute, as he had to leave early 😉

Here’s a quick overview of all the CG18 documentation related stuff:

Keynote Debut

As per tradition, our very own Niels Hartvig kicked off Codegarden with a keynote where he presented all the new and amazing stuff we’ve been working on for the past year. He also introduced two new initiatives: the new PR (Pull Request Team) and The Documentation Curators team ← That’s us!

Me and Jeavon got 5 minutes in the spotlight in front of over 600 Umbraco users to present our work with the Documentation and share with everybody how we are actually working with it.

My first ever Codegarden talk 😅

As I’ve mentioned in my previous blog posts, I had my first ever talk at Codegarden this year: Sofie’s Docs Diary: Origins. During this lightning-talk I shared my story about how it’s been working with the Umbraco Documentation since I started back in August 2017. It was an amazing experience, and even though I was super nervous leading up to it, I’m really glad that I did it 😃

Some of my fellow Documentation Curators also had talks during Codegarden:

Open Space

The Umbraco documentation open session.

On day three of Codegarden the Umbraco Documentation got even more attention, when it earned a spot during the open space sessions. A little over 25 people joined me, Damiaan and Jeavon (oh, and mini-marcemarc) to talk about the Documentation repository, about Our and about how we can improve the documentation going forward.

Mini-marcemarc excited about the open circle at Codegarden 2018

So, as you see, the Umbraco Documentation got a ton of attention at Codegarden this year. On top of all of that, it was amazing how many people came up to us with feedback - we simply cannot thank you enough!

Now to walk the talk...

The open space session was a GREAT success! We got a lot of feedback and a bunch of great suggestion for the Documentation going forward.

Let me try to sum it up for you:

Clear Call-to-Action on Our

The way the Documentation on Our is right now it can be a bit hard to figure out how to actually modify an article. We can only agree!

We talked about putting a bigger call-to-action button on all the articles on the Documentation to make it more clear how easy it actually is to suggest a change to an article.

It’s only been a few weeks since this was discussed, and guess what? The button is already live on Our! How amazing is that?

Have you spotted the new button on Our.Umbraco?

Documentation about Umbraco Headless

One of the bigger topics during Codegarden 18 was Umbraco Headless. A new product like this should of course be accompanied by some documentation about it, right?

Why of course!

That’s also why we merged in documentation about Umbraco Headless the Monday after Codegarden. If you’re interested you can find it right here: Umbraco Headless

How cool is it to have documentation live for a product that’s currently only in test mode?

But we are not done yet...

We talked about a lot of different stuff during the open space; Documentation for Umbraco v8, having a style guide for how to structure and write an article for the documentation, the lack of documentation on Umbraco Forms, etc.

A lot of great feedback, and even though we can’t handle everything all at once, I promise you one thing: We’ve heard you! And we really appreciate all of your opinions and ideas.

A race gotta have a winner, right? This particular race was a very close one: A BIG congratulations and #H5YR to Anders Bjerner and Chris Houston who've both been doing a tremendous amount of work! 👏With that said, having a very grammatically correct and typo-free documentation, I’d say we’re now all winners 😉

Now, back to those numbers. How much has actually happened on the documentation repo since Codegarden, and since my last blog post? I’ve put together some numbers for you here:

71 PRs merged since Codegarden! Wow!

That’s just amazing, right? Most of them containing typo fixes, of course 😉

Oh, and the best part - look at the numbers of contributors. That has gone up by 10 people 😮

There’s a lot to be excited about these days in the Umbracosphere. A lot of fresh new documentation has gone live, and there are some really interesting PR’s as well! On top of that, there’s only one tiny week till we kick off Codegarden! Are you excited yet? 😉 I sure am! But first, let’s get back to the exciting updates in the Umbraco Documentation:

Story by Sofie Toft Kristensen

4 minute read

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